How to Grow Herbs Indoors

The time to bring your garden inside and give some new life to your interiors is here.

There is plenty of talk nowadays about having environmentally safe and green homes, but there is a lot that needs to be done before you can make that a reality.

Having a home filled with living plants will allow inhabitants to enjoy a time filled with natural beauty and calm. It is time to bring in some really nice indoor plants into your home.

There is a reason why a home closer to the natural world is a lot more pleasant to live in than others, as plants will help soften up rough edges, livening up boring and empty corners and so much more. Modern interiors have simple and clean lines in so many households, but they don’t have to be that way unless you really want them to.

Having some excellent textural foliage and plants can help spice up an otherwise boring look, but you can also make a useful indoor garden, growing herbs for your cooking and domestic needs.

The following examples will help make that a reality:

Preparing the soil

The first step for the job will need to be properly preparing your soil for your new plants. Work on digging the soil with a gardening fork to loosen it up and to make it more pliable and easier to dig up and work. This will let water drain within the soil with greater success.

This is an important first move as it happens to be necessary for plants to thrive anywhere.

Keeping plants healthy

If you want to keep your garden healthy and strong, then you will need to deal with irrigation to ensure the plants will have what they need.

Most herbs will be pretty good by simply watering them as soon as the soil dries up a few inches below the surface of the soil.

You should avoid overwatering them, since the water may actually damage the roots and make the soggy conditions drown them if you go too far.

Try to stay balanced in your efforts to lower the risk of rot and molds forming in the soil.

And speaking of soil, you need to be able to tell before planting whether the soil itself is too dry or too damp, because in case of the former, the plants could wither, and in case of the latter, they could rot.

A good way to tell is to scoop up a handful of soil from the grout at about root level. Squeeze the soil and observe. If the soil falls apart without forming a ball, it’s too dry.

If it does form a ball, but it keeps the shape as you continue squeezing or running a finger through it, it’s too damp.

If too dry, you should focus of more frequent watering and adding more compost or peat moss. And if it’s too damp, then you need to dig up the garden and add soil amendments.

Harvesting the plants

This can be done fairly easily, just work on cutting up about a third of the branches whenever any plant reaches a height of more than 8 inches.

Cutting close to the leaf intersection will let your plants grow anew, so you won’t have to worry about it.

Certain plants such as parsley will work on growing right from the center, which happens to be a requirement to remove the older branches and to let the new ones grow.

Growing herbs inside containers

Herbs will be easier to grown for gardening purposes, so a warm and sunny corner of the place will be a good way to keep your plants healthy.

A patio can be a good compromise between growing plants outside and growing plants inside in a container.